With the constant drumbeat of marketing noise around “dynamic,” “agile” and “software-defined” data centers, it is easy to overlook the simple truth that interruption events happen. When they do, what separates inconvenience from full on disaster is a coordinated strategy of prevention and recovery.
Unfortunately, in their zeal to sell the latest high availability technologies, vendors have spread some myths about the meaning and methodology of business continuity and disaster recovery. Their idea of a recovery capability hangs on clustered failover, which in turn assumes near perfect replication of all data required to reinstantiate applications and workload prior to the interruption event. But without visibility into and control over all of the varied data replication services that are typically used to create safety copies of data, the task of guaranteeing recovery is a nearly impossible one.
Moreover, attention tends to coalesce around application data and code, with little attention given to batch processes, VSAM, or even data in flight between datacenters or DASD. The simple fact is that the centerpiece of software-defined data centers, “the orchestrated automation of pooled resources,” is still a work in progress and establishes yet another layer of critical technology that must be protected and replicated for a recovery to be possible.
This session covers the panoply of mission critical data and configuration resources that need to be protected whether your disaster recovery plan hinges on high availability or more basic tape backup.